This week’s podcast guest is Gary Byrnes, founder and CEO of Tao Climate, an Irish technology company focused on addressing climate change by harnessing the carbon sequestration potential of large scale hemp production.
Byrnes said the technology is primarily software-based and “will enable anybody involved in the hemp value chain — from the grower through to the maker to the builder with the hempcrete materials — to measure their inputs and measure their outputs.”
The company was selected to be part of Google’s Startups for Sustainable Development program, which Byrnes said provides “one-on-one access to some of the brightest people at Google, as well as ongoing workshops and training.”
Tao Climate is working with hemp farmers around the world to develop large scale hemp growing operations and to quantify the carbon pulled from the atmosphere.
“We want to make it really easy for people to see the carbon gains around the different activities,” Byrnes said.
“At the moment, the whole verification, validation and certification around carbon credits is very complex and cumbersome and expensive. So our technology will make it very easy to see the net carbon gains of all of the different activities around the hemp lifecycle. And it will also then make it easy to verify at scale,” he said.
The company has pilot programs around the world, including one in Kenya, where fiber hemp is being grown and measured for carbon. The hemp hurd — the inner core of the stalk — will be used for hempcrete blocks “to build sustainable housing locally where it's really, really needed,” Byrnes said.
“But also the bast fiber will go towards founding a female-led entrepreneurial business building hemp fabrics. So, you know, there are so many gains, so many benefits coming out of this,” he said.
In Ukraine, Tao Climate is “partnering with growers who are coming up to planting their hemp crop now, over the coming weeks, in minefields, having to dodge missiles and bombs on a daily basis,” Byrnes said.
“The reason they're so committed,” he said, “is because they're using the hemp fiber from their crops to produce hempcrete to rebuild Ukraine in real time. They're building hempcrete apartment blocks, and they're housing internally displaced people from Ukraine and also war orphans.”
Byrnes believes that agriculture in general, and hemp in particular, are humanity’s best way forward in addressing excess carbon in the atmosphere.
“We have a Utopian vision, Byrnes said, “where industrial hemp is growing all over the world and it's being used to build resilience and sustainable infrastructure and housing.”
Tao Climate
https://www.taoclimate.com
Tao Climate LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/company/taoclimate/
Tao Climate Twitter
https://www.twitter.com/taoclimate
Hempoffset
https://www.hempoffset.com
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Hempoffset Twitter
https://twitter.com/hempoffset
All Together Now PA's Hempcrete Workshop, May 6-7, 2023
https://alltogethernowpa.org/
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